24 is a U.S. television series, broadcast on the Fox Network in the US, and on the BBC in the UK. It is a thriller, whose main innovation is that it is shown in "real time", i.e. an hour on TV corresponds to an hour in the lives of the characters. It was created by Joel Surnow[?] and Robert Cochran[?], and premiered in 2001. The technique is not new, for instance, Timecode, a film released in 2000, from which 24 borrows its use of split screen techniques, to show events in two different places at once. 24 is undoubtedly the most ambitious exercise in such a dramatic technique to date.

The plot of the first season revolves around an attempt on the life of a black presidential candidate on the day of the California Presidential Primary[?] (presumably for the 2004 election, though this is never made clear on screen); the central character is Jack Bauer[?] (played by Kiefer Sutherland[?]), who works for the fictional Counter-Terrorism Unit[?] (CTU) in Los Angeles. Bauer becomes personally as well as professionally involved when his wife and daughter are kidnapped by the people behind the assassination.

It has received both critical and popular acclaim, becoming one of those TV shows that everyone talks about the next day, although some point out that the necessities of its format lead to at times egregious padding and some manifest absurdities. It has a notably cartoonish approach to technology, contrasting with the careful attention given to realistically fleshing out the main characters.

In the second series (2002-2003), president David Palmer, and secret agent Jack Bauer face the terrorist threat of a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles.